Chapter 7: 7: It's Me, Mercie Beiceuse

“Oh, ‘allo,” said the young woman poking her head around the door. She had what Wren thought might be called a heart-shaped face, nut-brown hair tied in two untidy braids that swept all her hair back from her face to meet in one larger and even untidier stream behind her head, and vaguely faerie features (here meaning she had wide, pale eyes, a thin nose, and a slightly mischievous quirk to her mouth; nobody had seen a real faerie in a very long time). “It’s me, Mercie Beiceuse from Plaisance, and who might it be that has the pleasure of speaking with me?”

“Er,” said Wren, then immediately wanted to slap herself. She’d been ering and uming far too much for the past day or two. “Name’s Wren.”

“Ah, Wren,” said Mercie Beiceuse from Plaisance, flitting into the shop with a flourish and striding to Wren with a rapid step that made it look as if she were tiptoeing across the fragile beams of an old bridge that might break at any moment, “very good to meet you, and all the rest, and…” She descended into what sounded like a sequence of indiscriminately placed vowels sprinkled with the occasional bit of phlegm, then extended a hand. Wren took it; Mercie lifted their joined hands and lightly kissed Wren’s knuckles.

Plaisance, Wren knew, was a town in the south of Galinique, which was the nation on the other side of the waters past the south coast of Gradia. If Mercie hadn’t given her hometown, her accent would still have given her away as Galinesque in an instant: it obliterated every hard h sound in a vague puff of air that dropped with a merry slide into the next sound, gave everything a not unpleasant sort of lazy roundness, and made the last vowel of each word long, turning “Mercie Beiceuse from Plaisance” into “Mehrh-seeeee Beh-soooooss from Pleh-saaaaawhhhhhhnss”.

“So, er, can I help you…?”

“Ah, yes, my manners, forgive me, but Miz Mason, I have walked past her outside, she says you are here working now, yes?”

“Um.”

“Yes, so it is, and so I am here in connection with the working, you see - I am a courier of things, with the carrying of items from one place to another, yes? And so I come with deliveries, but also very often there are people who wish to get rid of certain things but have nowhere to sell them, and so I take these things with me and I see if any of the many shops who are my very good friends will want to buy them, and then I give the money back to the people who gave me the things - with a little minus of a teeny-tiny fee for my efforts, as you must expect, hm?”

Wren blinked at Mercie.

“I have things to sell, if you would like to buy,” the courier clarified.

“Right. Yes. Um. Well, I don’t know whether I can make purchasing decisions, or even where the money is, but…”

“Ah, these are not problems,” said Mercie with a thoroughly dismissive wave. “Miz Mason, she can owe me, she has good credit, I am to be coming back this way in a few days, all will be well. One moment - I must show you what I have, hm?”

And she moved on her deft toes back to the door, disappeared outside for a moment, and re-entered pulling a covered cart, which she dragged with some apparent effort to a table Wren hadn’t noticed near the back of the store and which looked like it might be where customers made their purchases.

“Come, come,” said Mercie, “and I shall thank you with a very sincere heart for doing so, and you will see what I have brought for you, and you will peruse it, and - well, come here, then, yes? And you will see, and I will show you, and all the rest, and so it will be, and…”

Wren, realising that Mercie was just going to keep talking until Wren did what she wanted, obliged.

“This has me very much in your debt, and my very deepest thanks, and so on,” said Mercie with a small bow that might have come across as insincere or even condescending from most people but somehow felt entirely earnest coming from her. “And we will do this again until we have made a grand tradition out of it, and then one day when we are old ladies drinking wine we shall be looking back together and we shall laugh about all of this, a-ha-ha-ha-ha.” She rolled the waterproof tarpaulin off her cart and started to haul its contents onto the table. “Here we have it, then - a lot of nothing, if I am to be honest about it, and this is usually how it is, but perhaps one or two things I think Miz Mason will enjoy, yes?”

“What sort of things does Ms Mason usually buy?” Wren asked.

“Oh, you know, you can see,” Mercie said with a wave at the store at large, “she enjoys all the things that there is nobody else to take. When there is no place that sells something - nowhere that has the, ah, speciality in a thing - that is when Miz Mason very much likes that thing. If nowhere else, it has a home here, hm?” She gave a fond chuckle. “She has a liking for seeing the value in the things others do not, I think. She knows that somebody, somewhere, will one day need this thing that nobody else thought was of any use at all, and so she takes care of it until they come in search of it, and it has a place to belong in the meantime.”

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Wren felt a strange rush of… something she couldn’t place.

“Now, then,” Mercie continued, then dipped for a few moments into muttering rapid snippets of mingled Gradian and Galinesque under her breath before resuming mid-sentence, “and so I think perhaps that this is not of interest, or more likely that someone with more of a specialism can better identify and make use of its most unique and interesting properties, eh?, and this here, it is just so happening that I know a lady in Bridgecarden who has been looking for something just such as this, and so I shall put these things away and we will not speak of them again, thank you kindly, but perhaps…?”

With a heave and a grunt, she thunked something on the table.

“This is, ah, it is a what-do-you-call-it.”

Mercie stared expectantly at Wren as if actually expecting her to know what it was called, which she emphatically did not.

“It’s a, you know,” Mercie continued, gesticulating. “For the, ah, I am not knowing anything about this, as you can see from myself, but the making smooth of the clothes?”

“Oh,” said Wren, seeing what she meant. “It presses them and gets the creases out after they’ve been washed?”

Mercie snapped her fingers. “This is it exactly.” She made a face that Wren thought was supposed to be endearingly presumptuous. “So how much will you give me for this, hm?”

“I… don’t think I want that.”

“Yes, true, I see you have clearly nothing of the interest in the neatness of the clothes,” said Mercie casually, and Wren realised for the first time that she was still wearing the travelling gear she’d fallen asleep in (and, for that matter, was standing there in her socks, having not yet found the slippers Myrinna had mentioned), “but it’s not so much about this, but how much someone else will buy it for, and then you pay me just a teeny-tiny bit less than that, and then Miz Mason’s happy and we’re all happy and everyone has a most wonderful time, eh?”

“I tell you what,” said Wren. “I think you’re trying to offload that now, I’m assuming near the start of your route in Gradia?”

Mercie’s eyes widened, curious and delighted.

“Near the start, right,” Wren affirmed. “I think it’s heavy and you don’t know whether anyone else will want it, so you’re trying to get rid of it quickly so as not to have to drag it across the country for any longer than you have to. So I’ll do this - if you still have it by the time you’re coming back for the return journey, I’ll take another look.”

“Ah, Miz Wren,” Mercie beamed, looking genuinely thrilled at the fact that Wren hadn’t just rolled over and taken a terrible deal, “I think we will be very good friends, and so what I will do just especially for you is I will leave this right outside the shop so that when I come back it will still be here and I can sell it to you for a very big number of the big fat golden coins we all like so much, yes?”

“You can take it with you,” Wren said, firmly but with a grin.

“Well, what a thing to ask a lady such as me, hm?” And Mercie rattled off a string of Galinesque words with such rapid precision that Wren had to laugh. “What is the funny thing?” Mercie demanded.

“I didn’t understand a word of what you just said,” Wren told her in Galinesque.

Mercie let out a little gasp, then burst into rich peals of laughter, one hand on her forehead in disbelief. “I should’ve known,” she said in more intelligible Galinesque. “Myrinna said you were from Din, so I’m sure you had an education.”

“A bit,” Wren admitted, still in Galinesque, “but I got lucky. I could have chosen to study Brechtsen or Picandian or even Awethyni, but I picked Galinesque to impress a girl.”

Mercie gave a knowing smile. “Did it work?”

“For a little while,” Wren said. “It’s not a sad story, don’t worry. It just ends, like a lot of stories do.”

Mercie nodded, then switched back into Gradian. “That’s the way of things,” she said - with a much more fluent cadence, still obviously Galinesque but with barely a trace of the exaggerated delivery she’d had only a moment earlier. Then, seeing Wren’s face: “I know, I know. I do the ditzy Galinesque girl thing and people think I don’t know what I’m doing, or what the things I have are worth. Is it a bit underhanded? Maybe. But it works for me.”

“So,” said Wren, curious now, “what else do you have?”

“Ah,” said Mercie, “now, that’s the interesting question.” She hefted the trouser press, if that really was what it was, off the table and thumped it down beside her cart, then reached back into said cart and pulled out a flask.

Wren peered at the item as Mercie slid it across the table. Carved from lacquered wood, it was roughly cylindrical and big enough to hold perhaps three-quarters of a litre. A pattern like thorned vines had been burned into its surface, and its stopper was of cleanly faceted, rich green glass.

“It’s a flask,” said Wren.

“That it is,” said Mercie, “but it’s not just a flask. The person I acquired this from - and I trust him, I’ll say that - gave me a very interesting account of its history, and what it can do.”

In spite of herself, Wren leaned in. “Go on.”

“Well,” said Mercie with a salesperson’s grin, the kind that said she knew she had Wren on the hook, “he said it came from Acorton.”

“Acorton?”

Mercie nodded. “Yeah. You know, the one where -”

“I know what Acorton is, I’m just… it seems unlikely.”

“Doesn’t it?” Mercie picked up the flask, gazing at it. “And yet…” She gave a dismissive shrug and put it down again. “Well, who knows? But still, it’s not a bad story, whether it’s true or not.”

Wren sighed. “I feel like you’re going to tell me whether I ask you to or not.”

“Probably,” Mercie admitted, “but I know you want to ask me, so I’ll just save you the trouble.”

And so Mercie told Wren the tale of the flask.